Tara Mahfoud

Tara Mahfoud is a Research Associate in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at King's College London, and a Fellow in the Science, Technology and Society programme at Harvard University.

Tara is an anthropologist of science, technology and medicine interested in how, under what conditions, and with what implications neuroscientists produce knowledge about animal and human brains. Her current research analyses the Human Brain Project - a controversial ‘big science’ project launched in October 2013 by the European Commission to build data and computing infrastructure for large-scale brain modelling and simulation. Based on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with neuroscientists, engineers and project across Europe she shows how large-scale visionary projects raise questions about whose knowledge matters - whose data and methods are integrated into international infrastructures, whose get left out, and how these choices are made.

Tara co-leads the Neuroscience and Society Network, an interdisciplinary forum for engagements across the social sciences, humanities and neurosciences. She is co-editor of “Vital Models: The Making and Use of Models in the Brain Sciences” (2017).